Google’s Search Preference Menu Eliminates DuckDuckGo

In other words, people are not willing to pay enough money for the service DuckDuckGo provides to afford a spot on the list, and also DuckDuckGo&#x27;s service is unable to attract as many users as they would like without the aid of the list.<p>I&#x27;m generally very sympathetic to anti-trust measures, but this strikes me as a situation where DuckDuckGo needs to stand on its own two feet. If your position is that privacy is more valuable to consumers, then you should compete in the auction. If your position is that it&#x27;s not about the money, and privacy is an inherent good even if it can&#x27;t compete monetarily, then you should be able to attract and retain your users without free advertising. But if your position is that your product cannot compete monetarily and also cannot compete without the advertising that money buys, then it might just be that you don&#x27;t have as desirable a product as you think you do.

Very unpopular opinion, please engage with it on the facts, not their popular perception on HN:<p>After a decade and flipping from Apple services &amp; DDG-only to Google over time: I&#x27;m really annoyed by DDG&#x27;s histrionics about Google, from the silly domain fight they imagined, to having blinkered arguments about how they just need a free spot in the Android setup wizard and their market share would be 20%, and they should be the one blessed search engine who doesn&#x27;t have to pay.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spreadprivacy.com&#x2F;search-preference-menu-auctions&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spreadprivacy.com&#x2F;search-preference-menu-auctions&#x2F;</a><p>FYI, DDG&#x27;s point is that they cannot win the auction because they are less profitable relative to other search engines. They proposed a new way to determine the set of default candidates by search engine market share rather than running auctions.

I&#x27;ve been using DuckDuckGo exclusively for several years now. But while privacy is a nice thing it has never been the No.1 reason. I just prefer their search result page design much better. I love customization options. I like !bang searches. And I almost never have been unhappy from search results. I think if your main value is privacy and nothing more, you&#x27;re lost. Most users would value privacy, but it&#x27;s almost like pie in the sky thing, that&#x27;s vague, hard to define, hard&#x2F;impossible to prove and most importantly you don&#x27;t &quot;feel it&quot; right away. Quite contrary, using google will give you &quot;better&quot; ads. But some small annoyances (like design flaws) are provable and feelable immediately and will mostly win or loose you an user.

I don’t think the article makes it clear that the issue here is the use of an auction to decide what choices users have in search engine. Instead of just looking at user preference or market share.<p>That method naturally favors the bottom feeders in terms of privacy. It’s like awarding school lunch contracts to the company with the largest marketing budget. Probably not going to be many vegetables on that menu.<p>But I think google is making a long term strategic error here. They are feeding the privacy advocates free ammunition. Google could easily comply with the law and still have at least a token search provider that understands privacy.

The idea of having an &#x27;auction&#x27; is completely ridiculous.<p>The price being paid is company revenue, which is a function of how much value is <i>not</i> going to the consumer!<p>Imagine the best search engine in the world, that was maybe free (!) or provided by some government, it wouldn&#x27;t be there!<p>Every dollar in profit a company makes, could be in the pocket of consumers in terms of lower price or better features.<p>Ergo - you literally get the scammiest winner.<p>If all search engines were free and low-profit, the winners of this contest would be McDonald&#x27;s and GM, merely interested in talking about their brands all the time.<p>This is really bad, the EU needs to track a list of classes of search engines (i.e. A, B, C rating) and have Google organize them so A&#x27;s appear before B&#x27;s.

I&#x27;m undecided about DDG with regard to its relevance for my search behaviour. It seems that it requires reevaluation on at least a yearly basis. Practically speaking I rarely use it despite being very data privacy conscious and sympathetic with its goals.<p>But what I can say is that I turn to Bing and Yandex on a regular basis because they are simply better for some searches.<p>Bing is great for image search. Yandex is great for finding streamed movies, p<i></i>* and reverse image search.<p>Generally speaking Google seems to handicap itself by two forces: censoring content (for moral and legal reasons) and monetary optimization (like preferring click bait content over actually useful content).<p>Over the years my approach towards protecting my data moved away from aiming for anonymity (DDG, Tor, OSM) towards pseudonymity and data distribution over competitors. F.x. neither Fastmail, nor Dropbox, nor Telegram, nor Firefox, nor Office 365 etc are perfect but at least I don&#x27;t have all my data on Google and the rest of it on Facebook.<p>Sadly Google is rolling out or maintaining mostly unrivalled products like Search, Maps, Android, Youtube. I try to mitigate this by using separate fake Google accounts for youtube.com and google.com (via Firefox Containers) and LOS. Also I add an obstacle into the mix with uBlock Origin. Of course they can figure that out but if everybody does it then this would significantly increase costs. Also it&#x27;s completely transparent for me - not adding any effort.<p>So, at the end of the day it seems that the fight for my data became some sort of guerrilla war fare.

So the whining about money has started, as I guessed long back. Gradually, they&#x27;d start doing things that were originally &#x27;against&#x27; their idea of how DDG should have been, &quot;but as you know the <i>other people</i> are so evil, we have to do it&quot;. I had liked the idea behind their search engine (and keep coming back to try it), but never liked the kind of promotion that they have carried out so far (which mostly includes criticizing a single other competitor and that&#x27;s all). That type of advertising is never sustainable in my opinion.

I can&#x27;t fault their logic on the bidding system and the RoI of &quot;users&quot; when being privacy centric or not.<p>They are quite outspoken about it, maybe forgetting that they are a meta search engine! Perhaps the search menu should have &quot;Google based search engines&quot;, &quot;Bing based search engines&quot; etc with sub-menus.<p>searchenginemap.com is handy to indicate the &quot;brands&quot; of alt-search people are using are just really Bing results re-skinned, though DDG are quite clever into having folk believe their crawler is for indexing more new pages.<p>Often see comments about how people done a search for X on DDG and compare to Google, surely part of the taste test is to go look at Bing as well.<p>FWIW I think the search preference menu should not be a bidding system and perhaps free, but unsure how to keep the size of the list of entrants small.

DDG in theory is great. I would love to use a service that does what DDG wants to do for privacy.<p>In practice though, their search is mostly unusable. Google’s results are 99% more accurate for me, even without being logged in. Anecdotal, but I’ve heard similar feedback.

Does anyone have any context on PrivacyWall.org? They use the same privacy-first language as DuckDuckGo in their marketing, are a B Corp, and somehow bid enough to be included in the default set in most countries.

In case someone wants to know what are the winners of the auction: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.android.com&#x2F;choicescreen-winners&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.android.com&#x2F;choicescreen-winners&#x2F;</a>

I don&#x27;t think the auction model is &quot;fundamentally flawed&quot;. A law has to be fair to both the consumers and at least in some part (depending on the country) the businesses. Why would someone give them a free spot when other businesses are willing to pay big amount in a fair fashion, on a platform that Google has invested so much money for years to reach to this place?

The title makes it sound like google specifically eliminated DuckDuckGo, when in fact DuckDuckGo simply lost an auction. They demand that rather then using an auction, google should determine who gets a place on the choice screen by market share. Obviously self-serving, would make it harder for new competitors to enter the market.

What is &quot;Google&#x27;s search preference menu&quot;? Where does it exist?

Just set your new tab page to some searx instance, it&#x27;s quite a lot better than Google at this stage especially when it comes to filtering SEO&#x27;d results.<p>SEO is the cancer that killed the web.

The linked page[0] on the Android website explaining the choice screen has some interesting information on the auction, including:<p>&gt; Google will use a fourth-price auction to select the other general search providers that appear in the choice screen. ... The three highest bidders will appear in the choice screen for that country. The provider that is selected by the user will pay the amount of the fourth-highest bid.<p>My gut reaction to this auction system is that it would be vulnerable to abuse by a small number of bad actors. For example, what is to stop a company from bidding an artificially high amount in order to win the auction, knowing that they will most likely end up paying a more reasonable sum by the other fair bidders?<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.android.com&#x2F;choicescreen&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.android.com&#x2F;choicescreen&#x2F;</a>

Okay last straw for me, I switched my default searches to DDG. I hope that won&#x27;t make Google go bankrupt :)

my experience using DDG is that its simply returning the same results as Bing. Is the only value they bring that one trusts them more with our data than microsoft?

Is there some context explaining why this is based on an auction ?<p>If the goal is to prevent Google from using its Android dominance to also dominate search engines, a random sort of the most popular search engines in a given country sounds like a better option.

&gt;That EU users most want<p>I have spoken to a huge range of socioeconomic classes and the people that knew what DDG was explicitly said they could not care less. Obviously my sample size is minuscule but in EU generally people are perfectly aware of the spying yet don&#x27;t really care (which I disagree with but that&#x27;s how it is).<p>This just goes to show how suspicious DDG is acting which isn&#x27;t surprising considering Mr. Weinbergs previous business.

I think that companies like duckduckgo who make a product in the consumer&#x27;s interest are a bit dubious as long as their product is not open source.

What’s curious is that info.com, who won many of the auctions doesn’t even work. It gives me no results at all

This is upsetting. I just checked the results for Germany and decided to visit PrivacyWall. I was greeted by a banner of a pixelated Microsoft Logo (presumably because I use edge) next to an extremely broken translation of &quot;make us your default search engine&quot; in German.<p>So that localization criteria is... just not enforced?

The problem I got when using duckduckgo is the icon at top left. That makes me feel inconsistent in style. Is it possible to remove the background color in icon? The icon is so colorful.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

If you search DDG in Chrome surely Google sees what you&#x27;re doing anyway?

Ha, I also eliminate Google search from my browsers&#x27; search bar options.

Google has recently banned YouTube Competitor &quot;LBRY.tv&quot; From Play Store.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lacortenews.com&#x2F;n&#x2F;google-bans-youtube-competitor-from-play-store" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lacortenews.com&#x2F;n&#x2F;google-bans-youtube-competitor...</a>

I believe that if you don&#x27;t really like Google, then you shouldnt use other Search Engines than Google like DDG, just let them be very tiny.

DDG is based in the US. It doesn&#x27;t matter what the company says wishes or hopes. It is by nature not private.<p>Also Mr. Weinberg (DDG owner) who has built himself a reputation for abusing user privacy for profit (his previous company just bulk seller private information it got from unsuspecting users).

&gt; In our proposal, there is no auction. Alternative search engines with the most market share in each market are shown on the first screen, randomly ordered.<p>Not a perfect solution since the small search providers still end up left out of almost all preference selections by users, but it&#x27;s definitely better than the auction model (and ofc <i>perfection is the enemy of progress</i>). I think a slightly better model is an infinitely scrolling list, with the first 5 or so (or effectively 75% of the first page) being the randomly-listed high-marketshare providers and the rest being random low-marketshare providers. The UI should also require the height be set so that it indicates that more search options are available by scrolling by cutting off the bottom result halfway.

&gt; In our proposal, there is no auction. Alternative search engines with the most market share in each market are shown on the first screen, randomly ordered. The remaining alternative search engines are available by scrolling, also randomly ordered.<p>I agree, that this would be the best solution from the end-user point of view. But Google is not an NGO. Android is a free product that is being developed and maintained using revenue that comes from ad sales.<p>It seems logical for Google, or any other company in a similar situation, to expect a compensation for giving up even a tiny percentage of its revenue. Otherwise, from the business perspective it would mean that Google is simply subsidising its own competition.<p>Also, as unlikely as it sounds, having an auction system a kind of democratizes the entire search engine market for new players: now anyone can build a search engine for their own country and make it the top option for all local Android users.